Healing Trauma Through Meditation

Sep 11

In today’s fast-paced world where stress and trauma can take a toll on our physical and emotional well-being, meditation emerges as a powerful tool for healing and clearing out our stored stress, emotions and trauma.

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Best Meditation for Healing Trauma

Growing up, I experienced my fair share of trauma - from child sexual assault to being raised in a home where my parents used heavy drugs. There is certainly a lot I repressed and brought with me into adulthood. I have spent many many years working through this trauma - sifting through many different techniques that have and haven’t worked.

Effortless Meditation is a highly effective tool and technique for healing and releasing stored trauma.

Meditation is a tool that has been profound in my healing journey - and not just any type of meditation, specifically Effortless Meditation. I have tried many different types of meditation and Effortless Meditation is a technique where I felt and experienced its’ healing abilities rather quickly.

Within 2 weeks of practicing it daily, it completely healed my chronic insomnia (I wrote a blog post about I here) and slowly but surely (over a year and a half) it gently released and cleared a lot of the deep trauma that I had been carrying from childhood.

I firmly believe that Effortless Meditation is a highly effective tool and technique for supporting the process of healing and releasing stored trauma - and it is a technique that anyone can do.

How can Meditation Heal you?

This is a really valid question and one I could speak extensively on. There is a lot to unpack here.

When we experience trauma (whether it be physical, mental or emotional), our sympathetic nervous system is activated (our flight & fight). Often this trauma gets stored in our bodies and into our subconscious. Certain neurons begin to fire in our brain and when neurons fire together they wire together - making this trauma even more stuck within our subconscious.

Stored trauma manifests itself in many ways - from chronic illnesses, diseases, anxiety, insomnia, depression, overthinking, cancer - you name it.

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When we begin a consistent meditation practice, we are consistently allowing our bodies to relax and move into its para-sympathetic function (which is our rest & digest) - this is the only place where healing can occur. As we spend more quality time in our para-synthetic nervous system, very slowly over time our subconscious begins to feel safe and our bodies can begin gently releasing some of this stored trauma.

During Effortless Meditation, we experience Delta brain waves. This is interesting because the only other time we experience these brain waves is when we are in our stage 4 restorative sleep - in our stage 4 restorative sleep, we are deeply resting and relaxing AND deep healing is occurring within the body.

This is extremely fascinating because in our day-to-day life we generally never experience delta brain waves while we are awake.

Another point to mention regarding meditation and its use in healing is that a consistent meditation practice certainly cultivates more presence in your day-to-day life along with something called the ‘witnessing experience’. When unpleasant emotions are moving through and out of your body, you begin to observe, see and witness these emotions as they pass through and out of you, rather than actually becoming them/identifying with them.

There is certainly a lot more I could go into regarding the science of meditation and its healing properties - I could probably write an entire book on it.

What does trauma release feel like during a Meditation session?

Over the many years of my consistent meditation practice, I have been able to release a LOT of trauma from my body. It looks and feels different every time and a whole spectrum of experiences may or may not happen.

Sometimes releasing trauma from the body feels like nothing at all. I have had many things that used to trigger me in the past and after meditating for many months I found that these triggers disappeared on their own - without any effort.
Sometimes releasing trauma feels like having a very thought-filled meditation session. Having a meditation where your brain is filled with many thoughts IS your brain and body releasing trauma and stored energy (thoughts in meditation are just your brain’s way of processing and clearing stuff it no longer needs).
Sometimes it feels like mild discomfort in the body. This could be tension, headaches, or tightness in your body. Feeling physical pain and discomfort in your body is often just your body releasing dense and heavily stored ‘stuff’ - allow it to be there and feel it unconditionally without trying to change it.
Sometimes trauma release comes in the form of intense emotions - sadness, anger, grief, jealousy etc. The way we can assist this energy in moving through and out of us is by feeling these emotions unconditionally, allowing these emotions to be there, feeling them in our body for the physical sensations they bring (and letting of the mental stories of why we think we are feeling a certain way).
Tingling, tightness, heaviness, unpleasant sensations in the body, tiredness, anxiety, sweating, joint and muscular pain, emotions and shaking are all things that may happen as you release trauma.

For deeper physiological issues, the emotional release may take longer or come back several times - this is perfectly normal. Each time certain emotions come back, it is allowing you to release the trauma at deeper and deeper levels.

How long does it take to release trauma from the body using Meditation ?

There is no hard and fast answer to this question because there are so many factors to consider. Meditation will not heal your trauma overnight, nor is it a linear process in which each session gets progressively easier (sometimes this can be the case, but often it is not). Trauma and stored emotions are often deeply rooted in our subconscious - the key here is patience, time and consistently attending to meditation and our inner growth work. The inner growth work primarily involves: feeling our emotions unconditionally.

As mentioned earlier, for deeper physiological issues, the emotional release may take longer or come back several times - this is perfectly normal.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog post, there is certainly much more to say around the topic of healing through meditation and no doubt I will be writing more blog posts on this. If you are intersted in learning the powerful Effortless Meditation Technique, I run private courses and you can find more details here In these sessions you will not only feel 100% confident to meditate on your own but together we also deep dive into how to use meditation as a tool for healing and emotionally deprogramming. You can find more information about my group courses here.

Otherwise, I also offer Guided Audio Meditations which you can download and use anytime - this also includes a brief video on how to use the effortless Meditation technique in guided sessions.

Have a wonderful day,

Sammy x

Hello and Welcome!

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I’m Sammy, a compassionate meditation teacher and devoted yogi. Through transforming my own trauma into light, my mission is to carve the path for others to do the same.

I teach courses on how to meditate and to heal through meditation. I also guide people through private meditation journeys.